September 26, 2006

Some of Hitler's watercolours are up for auction.
posted by bobboggis 18 years ago
  • Wow, Hitler wasn't a very good painter.
  • /nods
  • Hitler... there was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in ONE afternoon! TWO coats!
  • LOL
  • This is kife. Good thing he left all the design work to Speer.
  • No Hello Kittys even. Meh. ;)
  • What kind of self-respecting genocidal despot paints in watercolours? Oils, baby...even acrylics...but watercolours?
  • Suppose he had been a gifted painter. How different would the course of history have been?
  • Hm. He would have been accepted by art school, would have been better off and fully occupied and probably would not have gone into politics. The Nazi party, or something like it, would still have existed, but it might have been more socialist and less racist. There would have been a war, but probably a much smaller one. The Soviet Union would probably never have achieved the total domination of Eastern Europe it had after WWII. The world economy would have been significantly healthier, with Europe generally and Britain in particular much more prosperous. There would have been no European Union, or at least a much less ambitious one. A substantial number of potential great artists and scientists who actually died in the fighting or the concentration camps would have fulfilled their potential and given us new creative masterpieces and technologies we haven't actually got. Or maybe nothing much would have been different: the Germans would just have had even better uniforms....
  • I have to say I like the technicolor look, with blues used for shadow. Is it just me or does it look like some of them are signed "A. Hilter"? Now I'm thinking of a certain Monty Python sketch.
  • "I don't like the sound of those boncentration bamps..."
  • I think Hitler had trouble with his eyes. His hand reproduced exactly what his eyes saw, which is scary, really. Perhaps he couldn't see how camp he and his ilk really were.
  • Well I think he was a great painter. You morons are just rattling off your typical groupthink bullshit - just because the guy is responsible for the brutal death of millions of innocent people, suddenly his art is somehow "suspect". You Hitler-haters are nothing but stupid NAZIS.
  • Wait, did someone mention Hitler paintings?
  • I agree with Plegmund's assessment of what would have happened had Hitler been more gifted. Very similar to what Robert Anton Wilson said in one of his books (I forget which one), that the rejection by the art college (or bollege, if you prefer) was a psychological blow that added to his later furious denounciation of 'decadent' art, among other things, along with his violent railing against established social systems. Plus, I think in another work (maybe Schroedinger's Cat trilogy) he suggested that more US Presidents should get blowjobs which would lower their craziness/stress threshold, thus prevent more wars - a prescient analysis I think speaks for itself, at this juncture of history. However I don't agree about the uniforms, I think the ones they had were grouse. Very sexy indeed.
  • Thus: Plegmund is a genius and should be lauded.
  • But if my application for philosophy school had been rejected, it might have been a very different story, let me tell you!!! *Pounds table, hurts hand*
  • Oh whatever, you decadent art loving Plegmundiscists. I'm off to have my neice shit on my face.
  • /without adequate response
  • He was a bit heavy with the black paint, but I have to say that they were better than what I was imagining they'd be.
  • I'm off to have my neice shit on my face Now that's art!
  • Ibid
  • Sold for £118,000.
  • Why do people seem to consistently assume that the absence of a immensely powerful, genocidal Hitler would yeild only people of great talent and benevolence while neglecting the remaining spectrum of humanity? Isn't it concievable that without the rise and fall of the Third Reich even one of the would-have-been innocents, or even power-crash suicides, (thats a hella lot when you consider generational factors until today) may have gone on to be even more genocidal and more powerful than Hitler with more advanced technology? Of course, I'm not touching any utilitarian arguments for anything here with a one-hundred foot pole. It just seems that myopic visions are all we are ever cursed to have.
  • it's hitler's fault that we don't have flying cars.
  • InsolentChimp: I think there's some truth to what you say. Given that there was a fashionable anti-semitism amongst the European intelligensia in the thirties (as Orwell pointed out in his vague of defense of Eliot's anti-semitism), its apocalyptic reification at some point seems a distinct possibilty. And of course, although the development of the Bomb was a direct result of the war Hitler provoked, it was a development which would have happened sooner or later anyway. No telling whose hands it might have ended up in, and what kind of war WW2 would have been, entered into with those weapons already in existence.
  • You're right, of course, InsolentChimp, the world could have turned out worse without Hitler, and the chances are WWII eliminated a number of potential mass-murderers and other villains. Stephen Fry has written a fairly good novel (whose title eludes me at the moment) where the elimination of Hitler leads to his replacement by a very similar dictator who happens to be more intelligent, charismatic, and cunning, with dreadful consequences. But I think the strong balance of probability must be that the world would have been a better place without Hitler: and I think that a random sample of a few million people is likely to contain, not only good people, but significantly more who make a positive contribution than a negative one. If it wasn't so I don't think we'd still be here. Now I think about it, I also wonder if things are as evenly balanced between good and evil, or at least betwen the creative and the destructive, as is customarily supposed. There is no such thing as an anti-scientist who single-handedly wipes out an area of human knowledge, or an anti-artist who can summarily close down a whole realm of the imagination. But perhaps that is a bit Pollyanna.
  • . . . a very similar dictator who happens to be more intelligent, charismatic, and cunning, with dreadful consequences. Just wanted to point out that dreadful consequences can arise from a dictatorial ignorant buffoon as well. See, what we need to do is to install the system of government that made that possible in a radical Islamic state. Genius.
  • But I think the strong balance of probability must be that the world would have been a better place without Hitler But Pleggy, that's because you see the glass as half-full... and I want to poo in the empty half. Seriously, though, I'm not so inclined to believe "good" or "evil" are not amorphous and non-continuous. That is, including creation and destruction and whatever exclusively dualistic teeter-totters may come.
  • That's an interesting thought, anyway. I've heard it suggested that the real cosmic struggle is not so much between good and evil as between the orderly and the disorderly, with neither being objectively right. I believe some of the old Greek chaps thought the world was basically a struggle between love, or convergence, and strife, or divergence. *strokes chin cogitatively*
  • Mmm ahh yess. That could be . . . *adjusts rabbi hat*
  • it's hitler's fault that we don't have flying cars It's Wernher von Braun's fault that we don't have rocket packs.
  • Volksrokket.
  • Hee hee!
  • ...and it's Werzog's fault that no child of man could ever live past the dates he chooses for expiration.
  • I ran across this fun little Kurt Weill song, written in 1942. It satirizes not only Hitler's artistic ambitions, but his family history. In a hamlet in the Tyrol, an old lady isn't virile; She is languishing, and heavy is her heart. For she thinks about her baby, who, had he been christened "Abie," Might have never played the monster's part If her son had only married, if her lust had not miscarried, Who can say for certain what might not have been? In her somber weeds of sorrow, she is hopeful some tomorrow Will undo the passion that produced a sin Shickelgruber, Shickelgruber, you were born a child of shame You have always been a bastard, even though you changed your name. came the headlines, then the breadlines, as your will to power grew. Shickelgruber, Shickelgruber, what a pretty how-de-do! Though a mother, I can smother mother-love at thought of you! In his youth his one obsession was to practise a profession, So he dabbled with the palette and the paint, But the art he couldn't master, so he went from paint to plaster, And today he calls himself a plaster saint. Is he good or evil fairy? All his pals have now grown wary (That is, those of them who didn't rate the purge), And the scent will ever linger, how he gave his friends the finger, Just to gratify and culminate an urge. Schickelgruber! Schickelgruber! Once the dew was on the rose! Where you'll end up in the wind-up, Schickelgruber, heaven knows! Ever ruthless, ever truthless, when the judgement day is due, Repercussions from the Russians, Schickelgruber, say you're through. Ev'ry village that you pillage, in revenge will turn on you!
  • Bravo, TUM! Good find! Any Monkeys who are Weill fans -- and those that don't know him -- are strongly urged to seek out September Song, a collection of various artistes performing Weill tunes, together with some documentary material. Much attention has been paid to the performances of Uncle Bill Burroughs, Nick Cave and Lou Reed, but it's the Betty Carter's performance of "Lonely House" and Teresa Stratas's "Youkali Tango" which ascend to goosebump territory.
  • it's the Betty Carter's performance of "Lonely House" and Teresa Stratas's "Youkali Tango" which ascend to goosebump territory. A-flippin-MEN! It's "September Songs" that got me hooked on Weill to begin with. "Youkali" and "J'attends un Navire" are like my personal theme songs.